2/02/2005
laptops for africa update
Several weeks ago I mentioned my experiment of getting old laptops ready to take to Africa. I now have 5 of these in my possession, but only 4 at home. The 5th is still in the box at my office. Tonight I finally got around to actually seeing if I could get them into shape. Since they all have Win98 installed already, my plan is to simply strip off any non-essential software, use Windoze update to update them, equip them with a compression utility and the fichasplus database we're using for the humanist movement and make sure they can transfer their data to an internet cafe and attached to an email to be mailed to me later.
The first two machines I tried were unable to connect to the internet. Not sure why. They each have a PCMCIA slot and I tried a couple of different modem cards in them. No dice. The third machine seems to have an internal modem but that didn't work. One of the PCMCIA card modems did work there, however so I'm spending a couple of hours with windoze update. Any thoughts on what to try with these other two?
I'll get around to trying #4 and getting #5 home one of these days as well.
The first two machines I tried were unable to connect to the internet. Not sure why. They each have a PCMCIA slot and I tried a couple of different modem cards in them. No dice. The third machine seems to have an internal modem but that didn't work. One of the PCMCIA card modems did work there, however so I'm spending a couple of hours with windoze update. Any thoughts on what to try with these other two?
I'll get around to trying #4 and getting #5 home one of these days as well.